Poets & Writers Theater

“I spent most of my life trying to blend in. / Try to fade into the background. / Try not to be noticed.” Abby Orbeta reads their poem “Chameleon” (“Hunyango”), which has been translated into Filipino, for this Ours Poetica video, sponsored by Complexly and the Poetry Foundation.

Irish poet and novelist Martina Evans reads Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Could Have,” translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, in this short film directed by Matthew Thompson and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation for their Words We Share series.

In this virtual reading and conversation examining the multitude of identities, authors Usha Akella, Manuel Muñoz, and Suzi Q. Smith read their work and speak with Aruni Kashyap for the 2021 Jaipur Literature Festival Colorado. Akella, cofounder of the Matwaala collective, is featured in “Building Solidarity Through Poetry” by Swati Khurana in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this installment of the Creative Writing and Critical Thought series, novelist Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies (Riverhead, 2021), speaks with professor Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso Books, 2013), about the complexity and consequences of translation and the paradoxes and power of language. The series is cosponsored by New Literary History and the Center for Fiction.

“Everything is untranslatable if what translation means is making something new that stays the same. But that’s not what translation is,” says Jennifer Croft in this House of SpeakEasy video about her origins as a translator and what led her to the Polish language and to work with author Olga Tokarczuk. The Man Booker Prize–winning translator is featured in “Giving Translators Their Due” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When you start writing, you start from your own readings.” Moroccan author Yassin Adnan speaks about how writing begins with reading and discusses the seeds of his first novel, Hot Maroc (Syracuse University Press, 2021,) in this virtual event with translator Alexander E. Elinson and author Laila Lalami, hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company.

“I believe that the best books aren’t those that entertain us. The best books are those that hurt us.” In this 2018 interview at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, Italian writer Domenico Starnone talks about the pleasure and exhaustion of writing and refers to a letter Kafka wrote about the importance of writing books “that are like an axe that breaks the frozen chest.” Starnone’s novel Trust (Europa Editions, 2021), translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri, is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s about memory, and love, and friendship,” says Sandra Cisneros in this short video introducing her first work of fiction in nearly a decade, Martita, I Remember You (Vintage, 2021), a novel about three women who travel to Paris to fulfill their dreams. The book comes in a dual-language edition with a Spanish translation by Liliana Valenzuela.

“The place was so deathly still and deserted that you might have thought the time long after midnight.” In this 2001 reading at the 92nd Street Y, the late W. G. Sebald reads from his novel Austerlitz (Random House, 2001), translated from the German by Anthea Bell, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Madhu Kaza and Jeremy Tiang speak about their “slow, long fall into translation” and how writing and literary translation are forms of encounter in this conversation for the Literary Translation Clinic series, presented by the Center for Fiction and Cedilla & Co.

“Fernando Pessoa in many ways was a writer of not so much his own time, but even more of a future time.” Translator and scholar Richard Zenith speaks about the life and work of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa collected in his new book, Pessoa: A Biography (Liveright, 2021), in this conversation with poet, editor, and translator Patricio Ferrari for Powell’s Books.

“To what and whom am I responsible when translating this text?” In this Center for Fiction virtual event, Brazilian literature translator Katrina Dodson offers ways to consider a practical philosophy of translation and speaks with translator Heather Cleary about questions and ways to approach the work. The Literary Translation Clinic is a monthly series of open sessions with a focus on literary translation as a profession hosted by members of the translator collective, Cedilla & Co.

In this Center for Fiction virtual event, Sora Kim-Russell, editor and Korean literature translator, joins Alex Zucker for a conversation about revision, editing, and co-translation. The center’s Literary Translation Clinics are a monthly series of knowledge-sharing open sessions with a focus on literary translation as a profession hosted by members of the translator collective, Cedilla & Co.

“I come from a place of not belonging and perhaps I started writing in order to make a place where I belonged in the world of novels or plays.” In this AAWW video, Yu Miri answers questions about her life and writing process, and reads from her novel Tokyo Ueno Station (Riverhead Books, 2020), translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles, which won the 2020 National Book Award in translated literature.

“Something that has survived damage can be considered more valuable, more beautiful.” In this book trailer, Andrés Neuman narrates a selection from his latest novel, Fracture (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, a cross-cultural story set against the backdrop of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

“Books have been such an important part of my life, from The Brothers Karamazov when I was a teenager to reading Charlotte’s Web to my grandchildren,” says Hillary Clinton in this video of over one hundred book-loving authors, actors, musicians, public figures, and professional librarians sharing their favorite books in celebration of the New York Public Library’s 125th anniversary.

To celebrate the launch of The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer (Avid Reader Press, 2020), authors Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer speak with novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, literary agent Annie Hwang, publicist Michael Taeckens, and publisher and editor Jamia Wilson about the need for new voices in literature and the ins and outs of the literary world in this online event hosted by the Center for Fiction.

“Black of pure tint, I cry and laugh / the vibration of being a black statue; / a chunk of night, in which my white / teeth are lightning.” In this video for the Favorite Poem Project, bilingual special education teacher Glaisma Pérez-Silva reads Julia de Burgos’s poem “Ay, Ay, Ay, de la Grifa Negra,” translated from the Spanish by Jack Agüeros.

“All translation must be regarded first and foremost as a metamorphosis, that is to say a radical, painful, and miraculous transformation,” says Jhumpa Lahiri in her 2021 Sebald Lecture on literary translation and the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, presented by the British Centre for Literary Translation.